Posted on 09/23/2013 1:09:24 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Over the past few years, there has been a growing awareness that many experimentally established “facts” don’t seem to hold up to repeated investigation.
This was highlighted in a 2010 article in the New Yorker entitled The Truth Wears Off and since then, there have been many popular press accounts of different aspects of science’s current reproducibility crisis.
These include an exposé of the increasing number of retractions by scientific journals and damning demonstrations of failures to replicate high profile studies.
Articles in recent days have discussed how the majority of scientists might be more interested in funding and fame than “truth” and are becoming increasingly reluctant to share unpublished details of their work. …
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Heisenberg also dealt with probability. Cats the world over shudder at the mention of his name. :-)
Yes and he concluded that looking at something affects its behavior.
It is not a science. It tells you nothing about individual actions. General chemistry is a science because the sample sizes are so enormous (1 MOLE = 6.23*1^23 molecules).
Wrong! There is theory and there are methodologies for estimating theiretical parameters. The methods are tested against the theoretical predictions.
It is not a physical science but it is a science.
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2344809?uid=3739960&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102670539237
Sample size says nothing about whether a subject is a science or not. Oversampling and overparametrization lead to false conclusions often.
Good science should gather and evaluate evidence for and against a competing theories that are meaningful. That method does exist and is well-developed, but is not in the usual "soft" science curriculum.
You are so right. See my post #25.
Science isn’t the problem.
I went to my kids ‘curriculum night’ at their middle school. We got the science class orientation, and at the end, they asked for questions.
I asked, “Is the scientific method part of this year’s curriculum, or do they get that down the line?”
Answer “It’s built in to everything we do.”
Q: “How, exactly, because I think talking about where scientific knowledge ought to be like talking about where babies come from. Everyone should know how it happens.”
A: “Not sure what you mean . . . .”
My response: “Well, unless you tell them that facts come from theories, for which you design experiments, where the variables are controlled, and then you do the experiment in a way that you can describe it for some other scientist in some other part of the world and get the same result. I’m quite sure that most people don’t know that, and its why there is so much ‘junk science’ around.”
One teacher acknowledged I was right, and it made her think pretty hard. The other just flat out decided what I was talking about was either beyond the kids, or too theoretical, and that she wasn’t going to consider changing course.
Common core is rolling down the road, and it will likely be one of the worst things to happen to education since the NEA. I can’t think of a better way to enforce outdated orthodoxy than to nationalize it, and then base teacher pay on whether the kids end up towing the party line on the way the world works.
I could have saved myself considerable time by simply crafting my own postulate - whatever a progressive accuses another of perpetrating is simply an admission of what they have already perpetrated, or continue to perpetrate.
No better way of enforcing ‘flat-earthism’ than to make it part of the common core.
Not as long as they (Mann, et.al.) are guided more by political considerations to further the aims driven by their ideology than they are by any ethical considerations underlying their scientific endeavors.
Besides, didn’t they conveniently “lose” a portion of their raw data? “OOPS! Sorry about that. Trust us, the data we lost just backed up our conclusions anyway”
I said that statistical science is not a physical science but physical probability machines prove me wrong:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xUBhhM4vbM&list=PLDF301534C65CED18&noredirect=1
There is a statistical flight physics
problem I worked on back in the 80s. It
involved estimating the scattered impact of the pieces breaking up in the atmosphere from the STS main external tank in the S. Atlantic.
The algorithm used deterministic Kepler equations to compute an impact point but these equations were formulated for vacuum and not for the atmospheric buffeting and shear conditions that were present.
Further, there was no certain way to determine how many pieces and what size pieces the tank would break into.
The solution was statistical. The algorithm ran a Monte Carlo iteration of about 10,000 or more cycles, each time varying in a random sense the atmospheric buffeting and wind shear as well as varying the number and size distribution of the pieces, and computing a scatter impact for each cycle.
At the end of the Monte Carlo run, all impact points were used to calculate a 95% confidence ellipse. And we made sure the ellipse was far away from coastal cities and heavy traffic shipping lanes. From feedback data we knew some of the pieces were as big as Greyhound buses.
The statistical science worked like a charm. Satellite images confirmed our statistical ellipse was safe and reliable in predicting the impact area.
Oh, there isn't a single FReeper who would bash science.
Scientists on the other hand...
It’s kind of like a political poll - 95% probable 24 out of 25 times!
You haven’t computed where the pieces would fall. You’ve only calculated a general probability. There is no guarantee where the parts WILL fall.
10,000 cycles versus 6.23*1^23 for 1 mole. I’ll believe chemistry, not limited mathematical guesses.
Yeah, I used moles in my day too but mole is but a derived measure. One inch = 2.54 cm and you can believe in cm too. That’s not science, it’s just units of measure.
But when it comes to scientific philosophy, you miss the point entirely. It’s no use talking to you.
The Mole
A mole is defined as the quantity of a substance that has the same number of particles as are found in 12.000 grams of carbon-12. This number, Avogadro’s number, is 6.022x10^23. The mass in grams of one mole of a compound is equal to the molecular weight of the compound in atomic mass units. One mole of a compound contains 6.022x109^23 molecules of the compound. The mass of 1 mole of a compound is called its molar weight or molar mass. The units for molar weight or molar mass are grams per mole.
You can treat the individual molecules similarly because the actual sample size is enormous. I will accept statistical conclusions with this many samples any time!
Your Monte Carlo was 10^4 versus 10^23. Oh, yours is a simulation, my chemistry is OBSERVATION.
Sorry, but I have a pretty long background in Chemistry and research.
Under what temperature and pressure conditions is 1 mole or 6.022x109^23 molecules of a compound set?
We are talking High School or Freshman College Chemistry are we not?
And by the way A Monte Carlo run of 10,000 cycles could very well be ten times as many cycles. But you miss the point completely. Answer the basic question above.
STP
STP or for that matter any other since the only mass involved is the electrons, neutrons, and protons. I did not specify volume.
And what happens when you don’t have STP?
Answer: you get a distribution which leads to statistical matters because external changes are never STP in practice.
STP is merely to provide a reference point. Everything in reality fluctuates and when you have to measure or estimate matters under non-controlled lab conditions, you have to use statistics QED.
I can see you have a high school/college level understanding of chemistry. Maybe you’re a HS Chem teacher. Good for you.
But at higher levels of science, statistical methods are crucial. Case in point: the Heisenberg principle.
I guess you didn’t read the followup. It is MASS only. volume temperature and pressure are dependent variables. Mass is not.
It doesn’t matter if it is nitrogen or uranium or gold, or any other atomic element or molecule or any phase. The Avogadro number is always 6.22*10^23.
I understand all that very well but it’s just a unit of measure of mass. It has no bearing on the inherent uncertainty of nature.
You don’t seem to understand that there are limits to knowledge and statistics is the mathematical framework to describe physical nature and its inherent uncertainty.
Unless you can overturn a century of particle physics, you are just making a mockery of yourself.
Overturn this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
Or try turning in a polynomial time algorithm for an NP Hard problem. Doing that or overturning the above linked material would enshrine you in science forever. The only thing that could top such feats would be for you to die and rise again, and even then it would be a close call.
It is arguable that the most damaging effect of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd is the damage they have done and are doing to the reputation and public view of Science.
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